Last Clock [iPad]

Developed by NewMediology (Danqing Shi), Last clock is a clock app that uses popular slit scan technique to keep you in factual time, human time and remote time. Just like any other analog clock, the app has three hands: one for seconds, minutes and hours. The hands, however, are made of a slice of live video that gets scanned to the clockface. With different refresh rate for the three hands, the three time circles reflect the rhythms of the space at different temporal resolutions. The app also allows you to stream the last clock camera feed over the internet.

13:56:02 Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden (above)

15:08:42 Ylivieska, Finland

The visual appearance of the Last Clock is highly influenced by what the camera is looking at. The composition, the colour range as well as the focus between the circles is very different depending on the target.

Last Clock was originally created in 2002 by Jussi Ängeslevä and Ross Cooper when at the Royal College of Arts in London. Here they started to rethink the display of time using live camera feed as a source, inspired by the earlier works looking at computational processing of time, and chronicled on Golan Levin’s reference page. The Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica festival in 2003 throttled Last Clock to a world tour in various exhibitions for years to come.